A Streetcar Named Desire is a sometimes sexy, sometimes scary dramatization of the destruction of a woman. The action of the play concerns the time that Blanche DuBois spends with her sister Stella and Stella's husband Stanley, and the action features Blanche's conflict with Stanley. Blanche's sordid history gradually comes to light, and Stanley's commitments to his wife and his friend Mitch only make him more cruel to Blanche as he makes sure that she is unable to start over with a new life in New Orleans.
The play thus becomes a psychological portrait of madness. Blanche's deceptions are at first willful, conscious attempts to make the world more beautiful and more...